This spare, beautiful novel retells a story at once familiar yet full of surprises, that of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant and a man widely respected, tells how those infamous proceedings occurred; how he became one of the presiding judges; what he was thinking during the testimony and deliberations; what the community thought of them (and him); and how he felt afterward. That premise is itself a bold undertaking, because it implies creating sympathy for a judicial murderer who thought a witch hunt was the right idea.

But Francis goes one better. Not only does he show Sewall at his worst and compel you to consider his protagonist fairly, he begins the narrative years before the Salem trials. There’s no prologue, no portents, no gimmick to placate a reader who might become antsy during such a lengthy backstory. Francis wants you to understand the political, religious, and emotional reasons an honest man like Sewall winds up participating in and endorsing procedures that are flagrantly dishonest. Yet despite what might seem a digression, the tension never flags. Why not?

I think it’s because Francis has entered Sewall’s everyday life, beliefs, and psyche so thoroughly that I can’t help being drawn in. Sewall’s a man who constantly wrestles with his faith. “Trouble and disgrace can come from any source; the world is composed of little things as well as great ones,” he observes. Every conversational misunderstanding, fib, nightmare, unguarded impulse, or declaration of spiritual terror from any of his beloved children sets him off on a soul-searching expedition that will inevitably lead to prayer on bruised knees. Even the bruises prompt reflection:

Would the use of a cushion to ease the discomfort be a popish luxury or simply a practical way of prolonging his devotions?
Also he thinks of his dear wife Hannah, who is somehow able to be both good and sensible at the same time, which ought to be possible for all of us, since God has not sown discord and contradiction in the world–those elements have been placed there by His enemy.

That enemy, Sewall believes, runs rife in his community, as in others everywhere. Massachusetts Bay Colony, though held to be blessed by God, may well have lost its way and fallen under the Devil’s influence. And since Sewall feels himself capable of temptation, whether by lustful impulses toward his pretty sister-in-law or the desire to please men in power, he’s not in the least self-righteous, whereas his judicial colleagues clearly are. Moreover, he’s convinced that the impieties he perceives in himself have brought God’s wrath, which explains, for example, why several of his children have been stillborn. Notice that he never blames Hannah. Rather, he’s quick to tell his wife and children that they have nothing to be afraid of before God, while he spends sleepless nights worrying about his soul.

Consequently, well before the witchcraft trials begin, you know that Sewall does nothing lightly, and that he’s trying his best to do right–if he can only figure out what it is. But aberrations like the witch hunts don’t spring out of nowhere, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the purge takes on a life of its own, and who’s the driving force. That doesn’t excuse what happens, only to illuminate it. And what a horrifying story it is, told so brilliantly that even though you know how it must end, you keep hoping that someone will have the sense to say, What nonsense.

But as the judges hunt down any who object and twist themselves into knots attempting to justify the course they’ve chosen, they silence any voice of reason. Crane Pond thus captures the smug, hypocritical rigidity of fundamentalism at its deadliest, and in that, the novel could not be more timely. With extreme religious factions exerting their muscle in our nation and around the globe, daring to think for oneself or hold a healthy skepticism can be a called a crime, even to deserve a capital penalty.

Like Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, Crane Pond springs from careful research; Francis has written a biography of Sewall, so he knows his ground. But, as I wrote about Doc, it’s one thing to go to the library, and another to weave fact into sturdy fictional fabric. Like Russell, Francis does so with utter confidence, because’s he’s imagined what his characters would say or do in any situation, and, most importantly, why. What’s more, he’s kept his prose style muted and plain, like the churches in which they pray, yet the words spring vividly to life, proving that a gifted author need not display verbal pyrotechnics to create a luminous work of literary fiction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Eighteen-year-old Petronella Oortman has left her small Dutch town for Amsterdam and marriage to a wealthy, much older businessman she has barely met. Nella, as she’s called, could have done much worse. She comes from an old, respected family, but her father has gone bankrupt, and, considering that women have no power to make their own lives, a good marriage is all Nella can hope for. Since Johannes Brandt ranks among the merchant princes of Amsterdam, the world capital of trade in the late seventeenth century, she has instantly achieved a status to be envied.

But that’s not how she feels entering her new home. Her husband isn’t even there to greet her, and when he does show up, he seems indifferent. Johannes doesn’t even assert his conjugal rights, about which Nella has mixed feelings. She longs for affection and warmth, but her mother has lectured her about the pains and discomforts of marriage, to be dutifully endured, because that’s a woman’s role. However, it’s not just Johannes who slights her. Nella’s sister-in-law, Marin, finds fault with everything the bride says or does, as if she resents her brother marrying, especially that one.

Yet there’s much more to Marin, a woman who keeps maps, souvenirs from the Far East, and business ledgers in her bedroom, and treats her brother as if he were a greenhorn at trade.

Marin starts to shift in Nella’s mind. From her drab black clothes, Marin rises like a phoenix, enveloped in her nutmeg scent–no lily for her, no floral nicety. Covered in the symbols of the city, Marin is a daughter of its power–she is a secret surveyor of maps, an annotator of specimens–an annotator of something else as well, not so easy to slot into a category.

Indeed, Marin isn’t the only manipulator in Nella’s life. Johannes’s wedding gift is a miniature house, inlaid with pewter and tortoise shell, a precise replica of the one they live in. At first, the gift bewilders and angers Nella. By giving her a doll’s house, is Johannes making a not-so-veiled allusion to her youth and the difference between their ages? But to amuse herself (she’s got little else to do), she orders furnishings for the gift house from a miniaturist, who sends her more than she’s ordered, all exact renderings of the inhabitants, dogs included, and the furniture. Each delivery contains a pithy aphorism or exhortation, riddles that leave Nella perplexed.

Only an insider could have created these things with such accuracy. What’s more, as events progress, and Johannes’s business empire shows severe cracks, the miniatures seem to foretell a bleak future, if not ordain it. Who’s watching or pulling the strings?

Normally, I shy away from fiction in which magic plays too great a role, especially as a deus ex machina. But to Burton, magic’s a tool, not a toy, and neither she nor her characters are saying, “Gee whiz, look what I can do!” Rather, The Miniaturist is about freedom, or lack of it, and the willingness to choose a way of life despite what others may think. Burton does an excellent job conveying the social policing through which neighbor watches (and reports on) neighbor, branding ordinary desires as sinful and stamping out individuality. The very creation of a miniature house inlaid with tortoise shell creates tension between a longing for beauty (and to show off) and fear of what others might say, perhaps from jealousy.

In this constrained environment, people are themselves miniatures, closeted in small moral and emotional spaces–invisible prisons, as Johannes calls them. There are secrets within secrets, lies within lies. Through their gradual revelation, Burton uncovers truths about how the world works, especially for women, and what few choices they have. That powerlessness is what Nella and Marin struggle against–Johannes too–and their engrossing story keeps the pages turning.

That said, I wish The Miniaturist went deeper, in two respects. Though I like the way Burton portrays the central characters, with internal conflicts and multiple layers, the town hypocrites, who make briefer appearances, could have worn capital H’s on their clothes. Also, and probably related, the religion feels put on, as if nobody in Amsterdam actually believed that stuff, when of course, they did.

In fact, by staying away from the religious core of Dutch life, I think Burton misses a great opportunity. The entire question of free will is central to Calvinist thought, yet nobody in the novel wrestles with it, except to worry that the civil authorities will punish them. Divine retribution seems far away, and yet in that time and place, it was a real concept.

Still, I enjoyed The Miniaturist and think it deserves its popularity.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Review: Flight of the Sparrow: A Novel of Early America, by Amy Belding Brown
NAL, 2014. 331 pp. $15

Flight of the Sparrow depicts the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the mid-1670s and the bloody struggle between colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip’s War. The premise supposes that Indians raiding a Massachusetts settlement kill the men and a few women and children, while taking the rest captive, among them Mary Rawlandson, a minister’s wife. For Mary, as for the other captives, shock follows shock–the murders, separation from loved ones, enslavement, near-starvation after a life of relative plenty, the constant threat of death.

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

But Mary’s captivity involves much more than trauma, which is why Flight of the Sparrow is a fascinating book. Her church teaching has reinforced the common assumption among the English colonists that the devil drives Native American life, and that heathen depravity makes Indians less than human. No surprise there, but what Brown does with that gives rich thematic scope to her narrative. Mary learns that many aspects of native life compare favorably with her own, including kind playfulness toward children, the willingness to share, greater respect for women, and, perhaps most of all, the expression of deep, unconstrained feeling.

Though Mary dreams of returning to colonial society and her husband, Joseph–whose absence the day of the raid saved his life–she begins to rethink who she is and what she wants, questions she’s never asked herself. She’s a captive, yet her definition of freedom (and relationship with God) will never be the same. You sense that she’ll somehow resume her former life, and you want to know how she’ll deal with that, or how the other colonists will view her.

To her credit, Brown airbrushes nothing, seeking neither to excuse nor obscure the gruesome violence Mary witnesses, nor to patronize the Native Americans as noble savages. It’s a generally sympathetic portrait, but a mixed one, and I believe it, as I do her portrayal of colonial ways. I knew very little of this subject, so I was pleased to read her thoughtful, thought-provoking narrative. For theme and scope, Flight of the Sparrow deserves an audience.

But in other ways, this is an artless, frustrating novel. Mary’s the only character of any depth. Her husband’s fire-and-brimstone persona wears thin after a while, because you can’t tell what sin and salvation actually mean to him, or why he has his particular take. To say that he’s a Calvinist preacher or a man of his time and place gives Brown leeway at first, but sooner or later, she has to show us more to keep him a plausible character with more than one dimension. There are hints, here and there, of vanities, desires, and weaknesses, but I wish she’d explored them. It would have made him more sympathetic, and a true match for Mary. Likewise, the baptized Indian man, James, who protects Mary as best he can, seems more like a representative than a full person. He’s crucial to the themes, plot, and politics of the narrative, and he reflects her conscience, but I wanted more.

The writing also bothers me, especially the emotional transitions. Instead of using metaphor, memory, or sensory clues to show what Mary feels, Brown offers summaries, full of rhetorical questions and bald statements. “She begins to accept the fact that he [Joseph] will not come for her and her affection for him shrivels.” This is a key moment, surely worth exploration. Another is the night Mary approaches James’s tent, an action that should feel as if all the devils in hell are leering at her, even as her desperation to understand what only James can tell her drives her toward him. But Brown describes the action, so that the passage reminds me of an emotional synopsis, what she might have written in planning the chapter. In certain similar moments, you can even imagine the bullet points, as with, “She becomes abruptly aware of how her clothes restrict her and promote her submission.”

I don’t mean to pick on Brown or hold her up to ridicule. I think she’s an astute writer who’s told a story of psychological complexity; I only wish she’d carried it through. And I bring this up because I’m trying to figure out whether my insistence means I’m chasing rare air in the literary atmosphere. Reading The Flight of the Sparrow makes me wonder about other books in which the authors tell too much, and whether most readers prefer that.

What do you think?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.